10 Tremendous Dream Sequences in Film History
He was a pioneer of film for a number of reasons. Buster Keaton was one of Hollywood’s first true actor-directors in the film industry. Known for his physical comedy and stunts, he took his filmmaking to another level creating one of the most memorial dream sequences in cinematic history. Using early editing techniques, Buster’s character falls asleep while running a movie projector. He dreams that he has come out of his body and walks into the movie he was playing, creating a movie within a movie.
Buster Keaton was truly before his time. Showing creativity and a willingness to try new things, whether it s a new editing technique or risking his body from doing stunts that could kill him just to get the shot, Keaton truly is a legend and created one of the first and most original dream sequences that is still impressive to this day, 90 years later.
I mean when it comes to a movie about dreams, it doesn’t get any better than Inception. Christopher’s Nolan fascination with the dream world and lucid dreaming took the dream world to another level of reality. The most realistic thing that this movie accomplishes is how subconscious memories can show up into our dreams, turning them into nightmarish scenarios.
The scene that really did it for me was when Cobb is showing Ariadne how to create things within a dream. While they are walking down the street she notices that the people seem to be looking at her with anger. Cobb explains saying “My subconscious mind feels that somebody else is creating this world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections start to converge on you…They sense the foreign nature of the dreamer. They attack like white blood cells fighting an infection.”
As they keep walking Cobb remembers the bridge that they are walking on and has flashback memories of him and his wife together. He starts to get stressed as he realizes this is a real bridge and then says, “Building a dream form your memory is the easiest way to lose your grasp on what’s real and what is a dream.” And as he warned her before about the projections attacking, here comes Cobb’s wife projection as she stabs Ariadne in the stomach and they both awake from the dream.
The first time I saw this movie was in my philosophy of film class back in college. It was thought in philosophy for a good reason. Director Terry Gilliam creates a futuristic world where character Sam Lowry becomes an enemy of the state, while chasing after his dream girl. To escape the harsh reality, throughout the film we gets a continuous dream that shows different parts of it throughout the film.
In this dream, Sam is flying with what appears to be mechanical wings in a full shinny silver amour suit. In the cloud we keep seeing the girl of his dreams, Jill, floating in the clouds calling Sam’s name. As he float towards here a building rapidly grows from the ground, into the sky. In a later dream, he dreams of fighting a giant metal Samurai warrior. He defeats the warrior, flying off in the distance with the girl of his dreams.
So what does this all mean? Sam flying represents his eagerness to escape from technology and the city. When the buildings disrupts his flying, this represents Sam’s inability to escape the city/technological life while also making a statement about how it is not natural to live in a city like environment for humans. The battle with the Samurai warrior can be looked at as Sam fighting off both the corrupt government and technology as a whole. There are a lot of great usage of symbolism within these sequence that can be explained in Sam’s normal life. The more times you watch the film, the more you will understand this dream fantasy world of Sam, dreaming of a world free of technology and corruption, free to fly off with his lover.
What makes this dream sequence unique from others is the use of cinematography, which helps establish a dream like feeling. The next thing that truly spoke to me was the stillness of the strangers around him. When you dream you don’t really notice people unless you are interacting with them. Another thing to note is the bus filled with people sticking their arms out. Another signifier that we are in a dream, as everybody around him is still, just like the traffic.
The use of natural sound is the most realistic aspect of this dream. And lack of dialogue too adds to it’s realism, as most of our time spent dreaming isn’t spent having deep conversations with people. By using natural sound we only hear the heavy breaths of the man. Telling us that he is stressed and feels trapped. He keeps pounding on the glass and then slowly climbs out of his car and then he starts levitating, flying over the stopped traffic, freeing himself from society. Flying is used to establish a point that the character feels trapped and is working towards a goal to break free of whatever is holding him back.
But wait, we cut to somebody on the beach who appears to be holding the man flying, like a kite with a rope attacked to his leg. He tries to break free but plummets into the water. This shows that the character wants to be free but is being held back.
Ripley is woken up 57 years later, or so we think. In this opening scene Ripley seems to be safe and is told so by a man who greets her. Ripley looks at her cat, and the cat starts hissing. This starts to give Ripley anxiety because the last time that cat made that face, it was to an Alien trying to kill both of them. This starts to feel familiar as Ripley starts breathing harder and harder. Not again. Not another alien chest bursting birth! No!
Cut. Ripley wakes up to find that it was just a dream within a dream. This opening scene was great because not only did it trick the audience into thinking this was “reality,” but it also serves as a great hook, giving the audience the same anxiety that Ripley has. James Cameron was trying to give the audience a feeling of the PTSD, to remind us of the mental state that Ripley has after losing her entire crew to one Alien in the first film.
Dark comedy is a genre that not too many people can pull off, unless you are the Coen brothers, who are masters at it. A Serious man revolves around a college physics professor whose life basically slowly starts falling apart. His wife demands a divorce, he gets bribed with money by a student for better grades and he gets kick out of his own house to live in at motel with his brother.
This dream sequence begins with Larry writing an equation for the Uncertainty Principle on an over-exaggerated sized blackboard. The fact that he is explaining the concept that we can never be sure what really going on, in a dream, it makes this Uncertainty Principle even more powerful. It also is true with Larry’s life right now, he seems to be losing control, not really sure what to do.
When the class leaves, one person remains in the classroom, the man who is moving in with his ex-wife, Sy. Sy starts to question this principal saying, “I know what’s going on.” What’s going on is that Sy is banging Larry’s wife, which he then yells at Larry while banging his head against the blackboard until he wakes up in his bedroom. This dream and the entire discussion about the Uncertainty Principal seems to greatly represents Larry’s attitude in life. He is serious about his job, but the other aspects of his life seem to just happen to him and he lives a life in which he has no control over.
Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
This is a movie that’s entire plot is based about the dream world and the real world. Freddie doesn’t kill you in real life, he does it in your dreams, but you die for real. We enter this scene when Nancy is in class and the teacher is talking about the concept of reality, quoting Shakespeare. During this Nancy starts to dream and see’s a body bag with her friend in it, as it goes into the halls, Nancy follows.
She’s stopped by the hall monitor. The hallway is dimly lit, showing us this is still a dream. As she starts running again, the hall monitor’s hands turns into Freddy Krueger as she says “no running in the hall.” That line shows the grey area between reality and the dream world. Nancy has almost no control because even at school, her reality is constantly being questioned. She continues to walk down into the basement, where she is attacked by Freddie.
I’m not even going to begin to act like I know what this movie is really about. Only David Lynch knows that. To anybody who hasn’t seen this movie, this is a deeply layered film with an immense amount of symbolism. On top of that, there is no clear moment that we are truly sure it is “reality.” This movie plays on the dream and real world by never really letting us know what is real and what is dreamed.
David Lynch plays with the concept of reality throughout the entire film. What I truly love about this film is that to me, it makes the statement that we really don’t know much at all about the dream world, and the state of reality that we think is reality, may not be reality at all. There is so much mystery about dreams and the subconscious, and Lynch truly portray those messages to the audience, even if the audience doesn’t fully understand what the plot of this film even is. Like I said since it is difficult to distinguish what’s reality and what’s not, I didn’t analyze a specific scene. But here is the first scene, which sets the tone for the entire film.
Besides the fact that this is one of the greatest comedies of all time, it also has one of the best, if not the best, dream sequences ever. This is the second Coen brother movie I have on this list and this dream sequence is near to perfect because of the Coen brothers ability to use symbolism perfectly explains the strange dream we find ourselves in.
First thing we see is two bowling balls and a bowling pin, symbolizing what is obviously his privates. Why? Remember The Dude is still fearing the threat of his “Johnson” getting cut off. The dude appears and is wearing a TV repairman outfit, which was what the man in Bunny's porno was wearing.
He meets Maude who is wearing a gold helmet with horns and a gold dress. Almost like a Goddess like figure. The Dude begins to teach her how to bowl, representing his sexual desire for Maude. He becomes the bowling ball himself, going down the alley between women’s legs until he hits the pins, symbolizing sex again. Once he hits the pins his dream turn into nightmare as he is chased by one of the German’s in a red suit with giant scissors, which symbolizes the dude’s fear of getting his Johnson cut off, and not being able to follow up on his sexual desires for Maude.
Coen brothers have an extremely gifted ability for symbolism, which is proven by almost every Coen brother movie ever made.
This film defines avant-garde and experimental film when it first began. I am not going to analyze this 15 minuets movie because there really is no right answer to what the meaning of all these images really mean or represent. The directed laughed at a lot of the interpretations and Freudian analyses that people created. His meanings weren’t as important as just trying to display the randomness that dreams really create.
The true intent of this film was to shake up the film world. It was one of the first non-studio, low budget and non-narrative movies of it time. Dreams are random and I think this film does a perfect example of displaying that. Dreams don’t always have a deep meaning, sometimes they really are completely random, and having a true narrative in a dream is rare as dreams don’t generally last more than 45 minutes, and that’s during the final stages of REM sleep.
